American fine art photographer Lori Vrba was raised in a rural town in southeast Texas with no exposure to art. She spent most of her childhood outdoors stick-drawing in the dirt and playing house in the woods. Her first encounter with photography occurred when she discovered a trove of family snapshots hidden in her mother’s chest of drawers that represented decades of family history. Vrba’s parents had never talked about the hard times they had left behind, and Vrba grew up without knowing her extended family. She spent hours studying the intriguing, anonymous faces in these photographs that she writes were “whispering stories from a piece of time that mattered to someone.” This childhood experience ignited Vrba’s love affair with photography. Her work is deeply personal and focuses on self-discovery and family.
The Moth Wing Diaries (Daylight Books, Spring 2015), Vrba’s first monograph, is a photographic narrative about memory, loss, providence and revival. It explores the artist’s sense of conflict emanating from her childhood growing up in an oppressive culture where she felt like an outsider, and from which she would ultimately escape to find peace, freedom, and a state of grace within the southern landscape of Chapel Hill, North Carolina where she has lived with her family for the past seven years. Vrba’s photographs, which were all made in her backyard, reveal her powerful connection to the earth, her vulnerability and strength, and her femininity.
Vrba writes, “My life experiences have brought me to this place where I find myself overwhelmed with the drive to make photographs about who I am, what I feel inside, what I believe to be sacred and enduring. I am inspired by moments that hold contradictions… like a big lightning storm that is really uncomfortable and really beautiful at exactly the same time. Such duality is true for the very best things in life. Loving someone is uncomfortable and beautiful. Having children is uncomfortable and beautiful. Being an artist is uncomfortable and beautiful.”
Vrba’s richly textured, meticulously composed photographs are packed with symbolism drawn from art, folklore, mythology, and biblical references. Her subjects, that include her three children, are actors performing parts in a series of dreamlike vignettes that examine themes such as the simultaneous joy and pain of motherhood, love, transformation and coming of age.
Vrba shoots with an old Hasselblad and develops the film by hand in her home darkroom where she also does all of the processing, printing and toning herself. She uses a unique toning solution that combines selenium with sepia to bring out the personality and detail. Her artwork is imbued with a 19th century look and feel.
An exhibition of work from The Moth Wing Diaries will be on view at the Catherine Couturier Gallery in Houston, Texas from June 6 through August 31, 2015.
BOOK
The Moth Wing Diaries
Photographs by Lori Vrba
Publisher : Daylight Books
Spring 2015
ISBN: 9781942084006
Hardcover, 9 X 9 IN.
88 Pgs. 51 B&W
$50.00 US
